promoting community-based development through crowd-funding, creativity, collaboration and fun.

Update from our first winner: Headway Devon

Voters at our very first SOUP in June 2015 decided to fund Headway Devon. They received £195 to spend on updating their garden facilities to make them accessible for all their service users to enjoy. We were delighted to receive an update on progress from them this week and wanted to share it with all our supporters. Thank you again for making such a big difference to your local community.

I am writing to say another huge thank you to you and everyone at Exeter Soup for your support of Headway Devon.

As you may remember, the very generous donation that was made last year was used to redevelop the garden area at our busy day centre in Exeter. I am very pleased to be able to tell you that the structural work on the garden has been completed.

This project has made a real difference to our centre and will enable us to offer new therapeutic and beneficial activities to our clients. The new garden has a range of features to make it more suitable for our clients, including raised planting beds, wider walkways and turning space for wheelchairs, accessible communal seating, safe and level flooring and improved access to the area.

Because of safety concerns and as we didn’t want to bar access to the outside area for our clients while the works were taking place, construction work on the garden took place at weekends and outside of centre times. This means that the construction was not finished until the autumn, by which time the weather had become less favourable to planting.

We have therefore not yet been able to fill the beds with plants as we had hoped but we do have some funds reserved for this purpose. Despite this, our clients have still been enjoying and benefitting from the new garden. In recent weeks our clients have been planting bulbs ready for the spring, researching different sensory plants using resources from the Royal Horticultural Society, and are enjoying making plans to plant vegetables for the new year.

We hope to be in touch again next year to update you on our progress and the impact of the new garden, but until then we would like to say another huge thank you for your support and generosity in making this work possible.

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Exeter SOUP

For a donation of £5 attendees receive a wholesome bowl of soup and a vote and hear from four presentations ranging from art, urban agriculture, social justice, social entrepreneurs, education, technology and more. Each presenter has four minutes to share their idea and answer questions from the audience.